Annual reports

2018 Annual report

The 26th Meeting of the European Vegetation Survey (EVS) took place in
Bilbao, Spain, on 13–16 September 2017. The venue was the Bizkaia Aretoa
building in the city centre near the Guggenheim Museum. The meeting was
organized by the team of Professor Javier Loidi from the University of the
Basque Country, including Idoia Biurrun, Juan Antonio Campos, Itziar
García-Mijangos, Mercedes Herrera, Isabel Salcedo, Daniel García, Vlatka
Horvat, Diego Liendo, Corrado Marcenò and Marta Torca.

The scientific sessions of the meeting held on three full days of 13–15
September, comprised a total of 55 talks, including plenary talks by Javier
Loidi, Milan Chytrý and Jürgen Dengler, and 59 posters. The presentations
focused on vegetation data sets, syntaxonomy, vegetation and habitat mapping,
assessment and conservation of European habitats, vegetation dynamics and
cultural history in Europe, soil–vegetation relationships, mires and bogs,
methodological issues and other topics. The meeting was followed by a social
dinner in Hotel Indautxu in Bilbao and by one-day field excursions on
16 September, which visited three different areas: Monte Buciero and Noja area
(guided by Mercedes Herrera), Obarenes Natural Park (guided by Itziar
García-Mijangos) and Valderejo Natural Park (guided by Javier Loidi).

The meeting was attended by 125 participants and 9 accompanying persons
from 21 countries. The most represented countries were Spain
(34 participants), Italy (18), Czech Republic (13), Russia (10), Slovakia (10),
Germany (9), Poland (5), the Netherlands (5), Slovenia (4) and the UK (4). The
other countries included Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Estonia, France, Greece,
Latvia, Lithuania, Norway and Serbia. Six participants from Russia, Poland and
Serbia were supported by the IAVS travel grants in a total amount of
5000 EUR.

The 27th Meeting of the European Vegetation Survey (EVS) took place in
Wrocław, Poland, on 23–26 May 2017. The venue was the conference centre at
the Faculty of Law, Administration and Economics of the University of Wrocław,
conveniently located in the historical city centre. Zygmunt Kącki and Ewa
Stefańska-Krzaczek from the the University of Wrocław led the meeting
organization, assisted by Katarzyna Łapińska, Attila Lengyel, Renata Łojko,
Mateusz Meserszmit, Małgorzata Raduła, Kamila Reczyńska, Grzegorz Swacha,
Krzysztof Świerkosz, Ewa Szczęśniak and Tomasz Szymura from the same
university, Magdalena Szymura from the Wrocław University of Environmental
& Life Sciences and Monika Myśliwy from the University of Szczecin.

The scientific sessions of the meeting held on three full days of 23–25 May
comprised a total of 54 talks, including plenary talks by John Rodwell, Zoltán
Botta-Dukát and Idoia Biurrun, and 80 posters. The presentations focused on
assessment and conservation of European habitats, plant community responses to
changes in management, vegetation classification and database management,
vegetation and alien plant invasions, and extending scale in spatial, temporal
and environmental dimensions. The evening programme included the guided tour to
the historical city centre of Wrocław, the Botanical Garden of the University
of Wroclaw, Stara Odra Beach Bar session, and a social dinner on the Wratislawia
ship with a trip on the Odra River. Three field excursions were held on 26 May,
visiting the Stołowe Mountains National Park (guided by Zygmunt Kącki and Ewa
Szczęśniak), Volcanic Heritage of Góry i Pogórze Kaczawskie (guided by
Kamila Reczyńska and Krzysztof Świerkosz) and the Odra river valley (guided by
Magdalena Szymura, Tomasz Szymura and Renata Łojko).

Besides the two meetings, the activities of the European Vegetation Survey
group between June 2017 and June 2018 included:

(1) The EVS Business Meeting in Bilbao approved the document Procedures for
Updating the Standard European Vegetation Classification (http://euroveg.org/…APPROVED.pdf)
and elected 69 members of the European Vegetation Classification Committee,
with Wolfgang Willner as a Secretary and Idoia Biurrun as a Deputy Secretary.
This committee is responsible for the updates of the standard classification of
European vegetation, using the EuroVegChecklist (Mucina et al. 2016, Appl. Veg.
Sci., http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/…257/abstract)
as the baseline. Stephan Hennekens prepared an online platform supporting the
work of this committee, integrated into the interactive online version of
EuroVegChecklist (www.synbiosys.alterra.nl/evc) and
the committee started to receive proposals and process them.

(2) The European Vegetation Archive (EVA) grew further. In June 2018, it
comprised 77 databases and 1,529,550 plots. EVA provided data for
66 projects. In total, 21 scientific publications were based on the analyses
of the EVA database, most of them with large international author teams. These
publications included 10 papers indexed in the Web of Science database,
10 reports and 1 thesis. Basic statistics of EVA data and EVA projects and
their results were summarized in the EVA annual report.

(3) The Wageningen Environmental Research (Alterra) became a partner of the
European Topic Centre on Biological Diversity and obtained the “Framework
service contract for providing services in the area of natural capital and
ecosystem assessment for the European Environment Agency and European Commission
DG Environment”, which should involve the revision of EUNIS habitat
classification, updating crosswalks of EUNIS – European Red List of
Habitats – EuroVegChecklist – Habitats Directive Annex I, developing
indicator species lists for EUNIS habitat types and mapping EUNIS habitat types.
This work is done with the involvement of various EVS experts outside Alterra
and contributes to reaching the goals of the European Vegetation Survey.

(4) The Special Feature entitled “Vegetation Science and Habitats
Directive”, edited by Fabio Attorre, Sandro Pignatti, Francesco Spada, Laura
Casella and Emiliano Agrillo, was published in the journal Rendiconti Lincei,
Scienze Fisiche e Naturali, in June 2018 (https://link.springer.com/…/29/2/page/1).
It contains a series of papers based on selected presentations from the 25th
meeting of the European Vegetation Survey (Rome 2015) and other invited papers
on the topic. It contains 11 papers plus an editorial.